The fact that the American president Trump now wants to ban the social media app TikTok so quickly is a little surprising, and then again not. His just signed executive order orders TikTok to stop its activities in the USA within 45 days. Unless the company is sold to a US company. Microsoft is apparently in negotiations with TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance.
The pretext for the alleged danger of TikTok is given with the data collection of the app and some alleged other security related offenses.
Another reason is much more obvious. The TikTok generation – young people – have caused the Twitter president a humiliation that came out of nowhere.
As a child, I always wished for a Lego train that could be driven electrically. The dream remained unfulfilled, but in return I got a model railway (Arnold N for the nerds among you), which I still have today and which now stands in a showcase and decorates the living room.
I had Lego like probably every child but very much so. An old Omo detergent can – at that time, detergent was still available in large cardboard cylinders – was used to store the bricks, of which, in my opinion, we had far too few. What my siblings and I had here were standard bricks, which today are more or less the same as those sold under the title Classic Lego.
Who hasn’t? You rummage in a bookstore, and a work catches your eye that appeals to you and whose creator is unknown to you. Igort – short for Igor Tuver – an Italian comic artist born in Sardinia, was responsible for Japanese Notebooks: A Journey to the Empire of Signs. In it, the artist documented his years in Tokyo, where he has been drawing very popular mangas for various publishers since the 1990s.
And Igort’s style is versatile, as you can see in his Japanese notebooks. Half comic, half narrative, he guides us through his personal experience with his longer and shorter stays in Japan, and introduces us to Japanese history, stories and special features. He changes his drawing styles to match the respective narrative level.
For some time now, the French publishing house Glénat has been publishing a new series of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse comic albums that stand out in their quality. After wonderfully drawn volumes like Horrifikland or Mickey and the Lost Ocean, Duckenstein (English: Disney’s Frankenstein) is now coming out.
As can be seen from the title and cover picture, it is an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The story of fictional author Mary Shelduck follows Shelley’s plot very closely, with slight adaptations that make it less gloomy and lighter for a younger readership. Of course, all the well-known characters appear, such as Uncle Scrooge, Gladstone Gander, Daisy Duck, and the Donald Ducks nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie. Donald Duck himself Victor von Duckenstein. The plot itself is set partly in Ingolstadt and partly all over the world.
Occasionally childhood memories come to mind and make you wallow in nostalgia. For me as a primary school student in the 1970s, the most desirable weekly magazine was YPS with gimmick. This children’s magazine differed from all the others at the time in that each time a more worthless than valuable toy – the gimmick – was included.
This had to be assembled first, if it was anything made of plastic. Sometimes it was a powder or simply a plastic sheet, which were then imaginatively advertised as “primeval crabs” or “adventure tents”. Often they were scientific gimmicks, like a hygrometer – a moisture meter, which failed with me because I couldn’t find a hair long enough, and which would contract or expand with changes in humidity and would control it that way – or because other parts were missing, like the zeppelin, to which I had no helium. Or simply that the parents didn’t play along, like with the square eggs.
Some issues of the newly published YPS booklets
While the gimmicks were usually quickly broken again, the comics still remained in the booklet. And they were of different quality. There were some original comics that only appeared in the Yps, like Yinnie+Yan, a TV crew that had their wild adventures. Or Yps, which was also the name of a striped kangaroo.
A young girl with a rare gift makes one cut after the other to a priest to bleed him as painfully as possible. This is the introduction to a story by the bustling French scenarist Christophe Arleston and skilfully staged by Adrien Floch.
What begins with amazing brutality at the hands of the young Sangre has a history that goes back years. Her parents, who were wine merchants, were massacred by the Dark Skimmers, along with their caravan, in the fantastic world. The Skimmers use flying dragon creatures to attack their victims, slaughter them with magic and traditional weapons, and steal their belongings.
I could not live in Switzerland, and that has nothing to do with the wonderful landscape or the nice people. The reason lies in something much more banal: chocolate. The country has brought the art of chocolate to a level that would make it difficult for me to exercise discipline. I would simply eat far too much of the sweet stuff inside me, and I would be happy, but too soon to die.
Chocolate Mousse
While I – in vain – try to keep my distance from chocolate, the Frenchwoman Catherine Bréard has done exactly the opposite. She threw herself into the chocolate business. As a young wife and mother, she prepared chocolate mousse for her son Alix whenever she could, with a passion she had inherited from her own mum and grandma. He called her his ‘chocolate mama’. But like so often life came in between and her job at the employment office left her no time for frivolities like chocolate mousse. Until her son, now grown up and moved to Japan for professional reasons, asked his mama the following: “Promise me that one day you will live out your passion.”
The film classic Ronin from 1998 had this great moment when Robert de Niro answered the question “Ever killed anyone?” without missing a beat with “I hurt somebody’s feelings once.”
Even though we are not killers – at least most of us are – I wondered if we can go through life without ever hurting the feelings of others? And what are feelings anyway?
To impregnate the concubine of the father, to be banned from the court, a lot of beautiful women and larded with poetry. That sounded a thousand years ago as an excellent ingredient for a captivating material, and a thousand years later it still is.
I am talking about The Tale of Genji, the first novel ever about a fictitious prince, which was invented at the Japanese imperial court around the year 1000 by the lady-in-waiting Murasaki Shikibu (ca. 978-1014).
Do we still remember that just a few weeks ago, without batting an eyelid, we ate a piece of the birthday cake over which the birthday boy or girl had blown out the candles? And now we get goose bumps if we only have to imagine it.
Almost two months have simply turned the calibration, which we should be worried about, upside down. As a child in the 1970s, I found it perfectly normal in our car – a VW station wagon – to ride along in the back of the loading area sitting on just one air mattress and sliding back and forth with it every time we braked or started off. Safety belts or head rests in the car were absent, as were safety seats for children.
Only a few years ago, it didn’t seem to bother us that we cigarette smokers were sitting next to us in a restaurant or coffee house. We didn’t waste a thought on it. And who didn’t just reach out for a hand to greet them?
